THE MOVE/MOVE LRZ 1002 (-68) UK MONO

By modern listeners probably most known as the band that transformed into Electric Light Orchestra in the early seventies, then a couple of years after Roy Wood and Bev Bevan as only remaining original members had teamed up with Jeff Lynne from Idle Race. I'm not the biggest ELO fan. I really like their first two albums and tolerate a couple of the others, but a lot of their later stuff sounds too posh for me. The Move on the other hand has been a true love of mine all the way from the "Night Of Fear" debute up to "California Man"/"Do Ya" 1972. Through various styles as pop, hard rock, psych and prog they always had great melodies with tons of catchy parts involved, often performed with a large portion good humour. Most of it sung by the inimitable Roy Wood who also wrote a majority of the songs. Between 1966-72 they managed seven top ten 45:s in UK, where of "Blackberry Way" #1, two further top 12 and one #23. The albums however didn't do as well and this was their only charter at #15. Containing three covers - "Weekend", "Hey Grandma" and "Zing Went The Strings Of My Heart". The rest written by Roy Wood, including A:s and B:s of two hit singles - "Flowers In The Rain"/"(Here We Go Round) The Lemon Tree" and "Fire Brigade"/"Walk Upon The Water". Described by current genre attributes it'd be called a psych rock/pop album. Rather uneven - split between old style rockers, pop and innovative outbursts - with the mixing/audio partly unbalanced and track succession seemingly unplanned. Yet so special it's worth attention and love also outside the persisting fan circuit. "Yellow Rainbow", "Kilroy Was Here", "Lemon Tree", "Flowers In The Rain", "Useless Information" and "Fire Brigade" are all British pop at its best. "Cherry Blossom Clinic" good psych with odd lyric theme and "Mist On A Monday Morning" string driven baroque not far from what later showed up on ELO:s debute. Taken together that's more than enough to make it a classic album, at least in my book. Originally issued on vinyl all over the world, though first US didn't show up until 1974 as part of the 2-LP set "The Best Of The Move" on A&M (SP-3625). Japan 2001 CD on Cube (VICP-61313) came with sixteen bonus tracks. Premiere UK had label as shown here and fully laminated flip/back cover. (RÄZ*) (RÖWS*)